On Tuesday 29 August 2006 14:30, Alan M. Evans wrote:
On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 10:31, Gene Heskett wrote:
> I was fortunate in that my grammer school education took place in the
> State of Iowa, where, back in the 40's, we were extremely proud of
> being the most literate state in the union with a 99.9% literacy rate.
> No educational system is doing its students any life favors when the
> high school graduating class is composed of 20+% functionally
> illiterate students, but they graduate anyway because of the un-funded
> no child left behind act.
To be fair, graduating underperforming students has been a problem for
much longer than we've had No Child Left Behind.
And 99.9% seems an awfully high literacy rate for any sample the size of
a state, even one that's proud of it. Perhaps Iowa residents, despite
excellent language comprehension, weren't so good at statistics?
I lived there for my first 25 years, and never met anyone except an old
recent emmigrant german farmer that signed his checks with an x mark but
wrote the check in german. The checks were always good, but his speech
was littered with germanisms... He died before I got wanderlust. And we
were pretty good at statistics thank you.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.